When exoplanet scientists first spotted patterns in disks of dust and gas around young stars, they thought newly formed planets might be the cause. But a recent NASA study cautions that there may be another explanation—one ...

A team of astronomers has discovered what appears to be a grand exodus of more than 100 hydrogen clouds streaming away from the center of the Milky Way and heading into intergalactic space. This observation, made with the ...

Observations by NASA's Swift spacecraft, now renamed the Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory after the mission's late principal investigator, have captured an unprecedented change in the rotation of a comet. Images taken in May ...

Astronomers have looked back to a time soon after the Big Bang, and have discovered swirling gas in some of the earliest galaxies to have formed in the Universe. These 'newborns' - observed as they appeared nearly 13 billion ...

NASA's Juno spacecraft has plumbed the depths of Jupiter, revealing that the planet's famous bands of swirling winds extend thousands of kilometres down. The work is the sharpest glimpse yet into Jupiter's interior.

Fewer large near-Earth asteroids (NEAs) remain to be discovered than astronomers thought, according to a new analysis by planetary scientist Alan W. Harris of MoreData! in La Canada, California. Harris is presenting his results ...

Astronomers at Lowell Observatory observed comet 41P/Tuttle-Giacobini-Kresak last spring and noticed that the speed of its rotation was quickly slowing down. A research team led by David Schleicher studied the comet while ...

The planet Mars shares its orbit with a handful of small asteroids, the so-called Trojans. Among them, one finds a unique group, all moving in very similar orbits, suggesting that they originated from the same object. But ...

Since NASA's Dawn spacecraft detected localized organic-rich material on Ceres, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) has been digging into the data to explore different scenarios for its origin. After considering the viability ...

For three decades, astronomers thought that only Saturn's moon Janus confined the planet's A ring - the largest and farthest of the visible rings. But after poring over NASA's Cassini mission data, Cornell astronomers now ...